Computational Sonography
3D ultrasound imaging has high potential for various clinical applications, but often suffers from high operator-dependency and the directionality of the acquired data. State-of-the-art systems mostly perform compounding of the image data prior to further
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Computer Aided Medical Procedures, Technische Universit¨ at M¨ unchen, Germany 2 Computer Aided Medical Procedures, Johns Hopkins University, USA [email protected]
Abstract. 3D ultrasound imaging has high potential for various clinical applications, but often suffers from high operator-dependency and the directionality of the acquired data. State-of-the-art systems mostly perform compounding of the image data prior to further processing and visualization, resulting in 3D volumes of scalar intensities. This work presents computational sonography as a novel concept to represent 3D ultrasound as tensor instead of scalar fields, mapping a full and arbitrary 3D acquisition to the reconstructed data. The proposed representation compactly preserves significantly more information about the anatomyspecific and direction-depend acquisition, facilitating both targeted data processing and improved visualization. We show the potential of this paradigm on ultrasound phantom data as well as on clinically acquired data for acquisitions of the femoral, brachial and antebrachial bone.
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Introduction
Tracked freehand 3D ultrasound (US) yields 3D information of the scanned anatomy by acquiring 1D scanlines or 2D images, respectively, along with their position and orientation in space. For further processing and visualization, the data is then often interpolated with respect to a regular grid. This procedure is commonly referred to as 3D reconstruction or compounding [10] and can be performed in different ways, e.g. forward, backward or functional interpolation. All these approaches reconstruct scalar intensity values per voxel,however, such conventional compounding techniques suffer from two inconveniences. First, they imply a significant loss of information and neglect the directionalitydependent nature of ultrasound. Second, in order to avoid artifacts, they impose acquisition protocols (e.g. straight probe motion) modifying the physician’s common practice (acquisition guided by interactive motion of the probe). In this work we propose a novel paradigm for 3D US representation, called Computational Sonography (CS), based on the the reconstruction of tensor fields instead of the traditional intensity volumes, cf. Fig. 1. In our approach, at every 3D location a 2nd order tensor is optimized to compactly encode the amount of reflected signal expected from each direction. In this way, both the anatomyand the acquisition-specific directionalities are preserved. c Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 N. Navab et al. (Eds.): MICCAI 2015, Part II, LNCS 9350, pp. 459–466, 2015. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-24571-3_55
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C. Hennersperger et al.
The advantages of this novel reconstruction paradigm are as follows: 1. It preserves directional information while allowing for the retrieval of scalar intensity volumes for arbitrary directions. This calls for novel (interactive) visualization techniques which better reflect the directional nature of US. 2. The proposed reconstruction paradigm can be applied to arbitrary scanning
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